In My Defense, Monsters: Notes on Black Poetic Grotesqueries, Composite Humanity, and Freedoms of the Horrific, Part 4

I like to wonder what Alison C. Rollins has done with Robert Hayden’s “Bone-Flower Elegy” in her poem, “The Beastangel.”

As Hayden’s poem begins “In the dream I enter the house,” Rollins’s adopts this method of entry. The reader of either poem likewise enters and becomes accomplice: I go with Hayden into the house; I go with Rollins into him; we explore the chambers / we descend into the body. As its speaker encounters bizarrities in which the gruesome and the sexual collide, “Bone-Flower Elegy” displays some of Hayden’s characteristic attention to volition’s fallibility—what might be his reverence for the role of ambivalence in desire. The speaker’s declaring “I want / to stay and watch but know somehow / I must not linger” echoes moments in “The Diver” (“I yearned to / find those hidden / ones … Yet in languid / frenzy strove … strove against”) and “Richard Hunt’s ‘Arachne’” (“In goggling terror fleeing powerless to flee”). I’ve digressed here because Hayden’s travails elsewhere among the likes of ghosts and monsters and amid his ambivalent spirit imbues Rollins’s effort of fusion with more than a poem-to-poem circumstance. The recurrent dual attraction and repulsion—which, in Hayden’s elegy, finds the speaker attempting to evade capture with the beastangel “raging” in pursuit—is the condition that Rollins expands into a subjectivity of hyphenate composition, commanding its own rationale.

Rollins’s speaker seems to enact its argument in two ways overall: in doubling or repetition, and through its dream-cast of hybrids. If the phrases “I enter him” and “I the eater” are not slant echoes, certainly the tendency to reiterate cements soon after: “he owes me. He / owes me” and “you’ll miss it, you’ll miss this…” What do these repetitions effect? Recognizing the possession or union that is to come, I have the sense of being persuaded to let it, to submit to the beastangel’s gaze and logic. This logic includes naturalizing contradictions such as “irreverent / as safe sex” and “skinned eyelids rolling back”; its never-just-one-thing-at-once organizes the lexical system behind “barcode / of cost” and “bold-faced [lairs].” From this dominating logic emerge compound creatures, like the beastangel / angelbeast, that begin to populate the poem and which Rollins modifies into further ambiguity. The horsefly, the heroic antihero, Hayden’s vulture-masked presence, the clinical centaur: each of these “beasts in twos” lends itself to a queer citizenry of the poem in which duality becomes the baseline and to such an extent that, by the poem’s end, it is these men who appear to be, by contrast, “creature[s] malformed,” replicating their grotesquery “on my mother’s tongue.”

I find two implicit transformations—or consumptions—occurring along this trajectory. The first is a matter of voice. Rollins either suppresses the first-person speaker or cloaks it in narration until its defiant tone and its ambitions against him, the debtor, reemerge in a fluctuating power dynamic, somewhat submissively and “hump[ed] toward.” Regarding the damage in question, who fed on whom? The second transformation is structural. “The Beastangel” is composed at its extremities of material borrowed from “Bone-Flower Elegy”; yet Rollins writes not further away from derivation but deeper into a material cohabitation as the two texts interlock and close the distance opened by Hayden’s “shrink[ing] away from the arms / that would embrace me.” It seems she vivisects “Bone-Flower Elegy” and, by a manner of suturing reminiscent of Wells’s Dr. Moreau, activates the foreshadowed union of Hayden’s speaker and the previously un-voiced beastangel. From Rollins’s proverbial operating table rises an expression of multi-axial vulnerabilities, an expression that illuminates ruptures in binaries commonly applied to sex, sexuality, power, gender, taxonomy, linguistic register, and poetic lineage.

*

Born alien,
homeless everywhere,
did I, then, choose
bizarrity,
having no other choice?

I think I had this question from Hayden’s “The Tattooed Man” permanently inked into my skin because I want to remain inside its paradox. If the only option left me is to be the “grotesque outsider whose / unnaturalness / assures them they / are natural”—if the only option is a non-option, can I choose it still? What choice have I otherwise but this very same unbeing? When I choose bizarrity, I recognize I am not the unnatural one; what is outside them outsizes them.

*

In her essay “Gabble Like a Thing Most Brutish,” Safiya Sinclair expresses her connection to Caliban of Shakespeare’s The Tempest by articulating this relation between post-colonial alienation, monstrosity, and poetic roaming-grounds:

Like him, I’ve always been an outsider. Home for me has always been a place of unbelonging. This is the strange yet all-too-familiar exile of living in the Caribbean, of being a part of the African diaspora: belonging in two places and no place at all. Home was not my island, which never belonged to us Jamaicans, though it’s all we’ve known, and home was not my family’s house, which we’ve always rented, all of us acutely aware of the fact that we were living in borrowed space, that we could never truly be ourselves there. Home was not the body. Never the body—grown too tall and gangly too quickly, grown toward womanhood too late. Like a city built for myself, home was a place I carved out in my head, where the words were always the right words, where I could speak in English or patois, could formulate a song or a self. Home for me has always been poetry. … His home was my home. His dis-ease […]

Reading Sinclair’s Cannibal (2016), departing the text regularly to consult a dictionary or to research etymologies, mythologies, curiosities of botany and biology, or to chase the leads of allusions to other literary works, I realize I’m at the mercy of poems whose voices actively resist confinement and consumption by a single disciplinary appetite; at least, in reading them, I risk being myself consumed in the labyrinthine pursuits they invent. Is this a vengeance, perhaps Sinclair’s simulation of labors she undertook in migrating from Jamaica to the U.S.—into its unnavigable racial architectures and its writing academies replicating colonial erasures, still returning from where she “bore the shamed blood-letter of my sex / like a banishment” (“Autobiography”) and being further apprenticed to the whitefathers of the canon? There is no way to simulate the self-fracturing experience, surely, but to reflect it, to pageant it, to stage the play of it…? Sinclair’s poems enact the dis-ease precisely, critically, and confidently. Though maybe not in any way that embraces home as more than a melancholic construct, her sometime project of correction via incorrigible intent—“here what was cannibal masters the colonial /curse, carved our own language of the macabre” (“Hands”)—evokes a kind of homing.

Similar to Burroughs’s The Vital System, a disjointed nascence informs the speakers of Cannibal, particularly those haunted by the ghost of a conjoined twin, as in “Chimera,” which ends:

… I was born
anemic and only half a self, purpling and diaphanous
at the wound, salvaged unwillingly from this divergent

sacrifice, still clinging to your absent warmth. Sometimes
I imagine nothing has changed—you rib and I claw,
sailing the earth in our wry husk, both preserved as one

taxidermic enigma, or coiled in a thick jar
of amnion in Mother’s old cupboard,
dreaming the same dream in the dark.

This half-selfhood opens Cannibal’s speakers to “divergent” “enigma” as the seat of experience, finds them angling toward that hyphenate mutability Mona Arshi describes in “On Gods, Human Rights, and the Poet.” Sinclair moves into the position of orchestrator, wild flora and fauna her co-conspirators and appendages (the pathetic fallacy recognized as fallacious and discarded), developing the collection’s overall atmosphere of revelry in thingness. Inspired by the reveries of Caliban and resonating with, as I find it, Acevedo’s lament for colonialism’s steady obscurations in “La Ciguapa,” Sinclair writes in “Dreaming in Foreign”:

Circumstance has made us strangers here,
wild dance we are slowly forgetting; what home.
The Mobay sky a lingering torch to mutiny. Rebellion.
Here I conspire with fish-monster, ignite and riot
with sugarcane, with shame-a-ladies, brush palms
in solidarity with each thorn, each shy tentacle,
our bodies opening and closing eager,
breathing the dark impossible.

It is the achievement of this “dark impossible” that becomes Sinclair’s most salient project. As she carries her dialectical engagement with the “purely linguistic sense” of Caribbean savagery further beyond the well-lit milieu of an anthropocentric I and into experiments of embodiment—using what I consider an inflective writing mode (as in the bending in, as in transformation by affixation, as in a tonal distinction that is here one of defiance in prologue to revelation), as distinguished from those reflective speakers who appear to maintain their investment in the sovereignty of the whole, human subject—she creates composite ways of being while mobilizing a lexical bricolage that, at large, is an attractively grotesque body of English lyric poetry and, on the line-level, is restless with connotation and curiosities of grammar; in short, monstrous speakers speaking monstrously. I consider “Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” Cannibal’s sixth poem, a moderate iteration thus in its depiction of a metamorphic, self-revising Eve, well-versed in the infertile and femme-phobic fantasies typical of the omniscient masculine gaze, and insisting ominously—“let me have it”—on a post-paradisiacal landscape populated by ever more forms of her genitalia, “splayed” and menstruating in “miraculous display,” in what Sinclair has herself named “the poetics of an impolite body.”

“Portrait of Eve as the Anaconda,” as well as the series “One Hundred Amazing Facts About the Negro, with Complete Proof” and “Center of the World” all present speakers who either are not concisely legible within the human condition or emphatically decenter or disregard its confines. Meanwhile the horizons of their poems’ final lines promise revolting creation, or creation in revolt: Eve’s parthenogenesis, the Negro’s venomous heirs, a cataclysm of Black, a cannibal’s un-originating, and “a towering sphinx[’s] wet dawn devouring.”

“Crania Americana,” Cannibal’s final revisionary feat, responds in part to white-supremacist pseudoscience with a text that “incorporates, alludes to, and repurposes the lines, words, and phrases from Shakespeare’s The Tempest that are either spoken by Caliban or spoken in direct reference to Caliban.” This cannibalism of Shakespeare and simultaneous interchange of what language expresses and imposes upon Caliban seems to mobilize the collection’s thorough proposition of inhabiting the myth of savagery or monstrosity as way to delegitimize the authority of its contrivers and reclaim those terms as imaginative and intellectual leeway.

CRANIA AMERICANA

The Caucasian skull is large and oval, with well-proportioned features. The nasal bones are arched, the chin full, the teeth vertical. This race is distinguished for the facility with which it attains the highest intellectual endowments.

       Lusus Naturae
                noun (rare)
                A freak of nature.
 

Black body burns itself
                        to bushfire—
spurned husk that I am. Skinned viscous,
daughtering fever. Grief knifes its slow lava

through my fluorescent, gnarled
as if a neon viper, as if singed animus.
Gaslamp-hot for necking, lit oceanliners
                                    gulped in.

Such is our ambush.     Spore of my peculiar—
Even the sea derails full-throttle at every turn.

What scurvy thrush unmoors          this boiled
microbial     as spite besots my humid mouth.

Storm, hag-seed and holy.
Come dusk, a rumbottle sky
                                    I am sipping.
My preening tongue, the guillotine.

Know nothing here will grow politely.
Such is our nature.
Such lurid rains sedate us villainous low:

This eel-eye screws to dazzling fright
            what slowly turns to vapor,
and another hot light spoils me
                                    for grotesquerie.

Sibling, Sisyphean.    Howl of my unusual,
now we have reclassified the very
                                          ape of us.

Half fish             and Half monstrous.
Drowned spine of toothache take us
and barnacled,    all crippled filaments
                        all jawbone.

Already plucked         of cruder blooms,
brined hippocampus
                        unzipped with germ.

My dropsied and unteachable.
Lo, this Indigene. Hissing into madness
this infrared. All night

our dark carousel haphazards,
            churning to house our many jargon,
masked congenital, and cloven in.

Diagram and mooncalfed.         Even I.
How sometime I am wound with solitude.

            Enough a Negress all myself.

Scorn, one golliwog-bone knots the black
mock of me, naked and denouncing
             us artless.

Vexed skinfolk. Unfossiled, hence.
What a brittle world is        man.
Self inflammable, I abjure you.

And wear your gabble like a diadem,
This flecked crown of dictions,
                                    this bioluminescence.

Predator coiled eager       at the edge
                                    of these maps.

Master,  Dare I

                        unjungle it?

Like Rollins’s “The Beastangel,” this poem is marked by the presence of compounds and hyphenate constructions: “gaslamp-hot,” “hag-seed,” “rumbottle sky,” “eel-eye,” “golliwog-bone,” etc. It is also marked by a preference for fragmentation and for modifiers that quite literally dangle from the lines. Taken together, these motifs of structure and content insinuate a conceit wherein incompletion, appendage, and metamorphosis appear to be fundamental matters of being—both for the speaker and the raw material of the poem itself. There are also curious possessive constructions: “my fluorescent,” “my peculiar,” “my unusual,” “my dropsied and unteachable.” This adjective doubling, determined undeterminers, seems to both defer the object of possession and to abstract possession in such a way as either to parody certain ownership, to cast object-hood or noun-ing into doubt, or to imply that, for this Caliban-like speaker, only that which cannot be owned or fully demystified is worth holding. “The very / ape of us” and “the black / mock of me” offer a similar trouble in that their syntax foregrounds the modifier and delivers last the possessive determiner after the preposition of. As once again the line break lends itself to these phrases’ interpretive play, they communicate seeming oppositions. The ape of us can be construed as the ape we are, the ape we own / our ape, and the aping we do or is done to us. Likewise, the second phrase can encompass the black mock / mock(ery) of black that I am; the mock I make of black / that black makes of me; and my black mock(ery). Each carries a different, more or less subtle sense of agency, though their swiveling intention is, I think, useful to Sinclair’s exploitation and explosion of this text (and language) with which she has long been incubationally intimate: “And wear your gabble like a diadem … Dare I / unjungle it?” Note the actors involved in these additional undoings (italics mine):

What scurvy thrush unmoors           this boiled
microbial     as spite besots my humid mouth.

Already plucked         of cruder blooms,
brined hippocampus
                        unzipped with germ.

Involved in the unmooring and unzipping are various items in the lexicon of pathology: “scurvy,” “thrush,” “microbial,” “germ,” and, also in proximity, “spore” and “dropsied.”  The infections in the lines above—of the mouth and of the mind—seem crucial to the speaker’s unfastened “hissing into madness.” What can Sinclair mean by making metrical (iambic) regularity ride this maddening? Within a healthily skeptical, post-colonial poetics, how do these stress patterns operate? As a symptom? As a tick in the organ of what canonical knowledge partially composes the coming monster? As a fool’s fire, seducing the classicist’s ear to its demise—a pulse under peril? I think there’s something to be said for the anti-assonant or pan-vowel cadence of ghoulish, staggering feet within the lines “This eel-eye screws to dazzling fright / what slowly turns to vapor”—a minutia, perhaps, of Cannibal’s mission to create from the dissolution of purity (here, read as rhyme) its entropic dystopias.

Vexed skinfolk. Unfossiled, hence.
What a brittle world is        man.

“Unfossiled” arrives “hence”—as an eventuality, as terminal. Toward an enduring, open-ended resonance, I’ve come to interpret these lines as the emergence of a revenant intellect, to read the “vexed” “madness” as a means of dislocating from man’s “brittle world” so as to perceive it and, from that point, recover (unfossil) something more substantial, some way primeval. Though the speaker does not identify the “Predator coiled eager at the edge / of these maps,” I am left with her / their / its excoriating, critical gaze and menacing ambition to expose the whole known world to its appetite.

*

Rollins’s “The Beastangel” and Sinclair’s “Crania Americana” share an approach that is characterized simultaneously by the dismemberment of a text and the vocalization of that text’s monstrous subjectivity. If I return to Beachy-Quick’s lecture—which inquires about the effects of violence in poetry on those who imagine it vis-à-vis The Iliad and its sons—and reconsider the above works in the terms of the poem as shield as world-building that can either conceal the self in a myth of heroism, or otherwise reflect soul-making (via Keats) and make legible the world’s damage, I find that the dichotomy dissolves. Indeed, these poems seem unavailable to self-flagellation as the coterminous obverse of violent world-building, perhaps precisely because the poetics that Rollins and Sinclair (and Burroughs and others) demonstrate issues forth from the ontological position of that which has been contrived deliberately to justify violent world-building. These poems are aware of the hero-myth as indistinguishable from world-damnation. The dismembered texts exist—just as the world is violently “built”—expressly because the monstrous impulse pre-exists them.

I say the Black zero is the shattering; in the absence of the shield, what is there but the extant world and the monster? What can a poem be when the one is in the other? If I have to write in this world, then may I write headlong into a horizon rife with art that so obliterates the contours of how we’ve imagined or understood being and capability that the myths of exceptional creatures endowed with a mandate to tame the terrain cannot stand against, among, or at all.

___

“Crania Americana” and lines from “Chimera” and “Dreaming in Foreign” reproduced from Cannibal by Safiya Sinclair by permission of the University of Nebraska Press. Copyright 2016 by the Board of Regents of the University of Nebraska.